Photo credit by !Khwa ttu San Culture and Education Centre, Western Cape, South Africa

Amakhala Game Reserve, Eastern Cape, South Africa

Fastjet Zimbabwe in final stage for Air Operator Certificate

Following the arrival in Harare of Fastjet’s first Airbus A319 for the new Zimbabwean franchise operation, final preparations are underway to undergo the remaining audit stage ahead of the expected granting of an Air Operator Certificate (AOC).

The Zimbabwe Civil Aviation Authority has worked with the airline over the past few months towards this stage and progressively ticked all the boxes up to this point.

Flight operations are expected to be launched as early as October this year, making it the second Fastjet operation in Africa after Tanzania. No formal announcement has been made yet by Fastjet PLC on the anticipated routes the new airline will operate to out of Harare. Johannesburg has been mentioned though in the past as the airline’s first and perhaps most important regional destination, and Lusaka is already linked to Harare through the daily scheduled flight out of Dar es Salaam, which connects the two cities. Once an AOC has been granted, it can be expected that this flight might be used to also serve Lusaka daily.

On the domestic front, the two main commercial routes are those to Victoria Falls and to Bulawayo, but it remains to be seen which will form part of the FastJet (Zimbabwe) launch.

Next in line will then be Zambia where Fastjet PLC also intends to launch operations after; similarly to Zimbabwe, an aircraft has been secured for deployment to Lusaka.